#she's just as much victim of the solver and the company as the others

[handfulofmuses]

You know what I like about the new episode?

V's and N's reaction when they reunited with J. Even after everything, they still love their boss.

We have N, who is all excited: "It is you!" and then V's amused: "Classic J."

It makes me think that V's and J's relationship were a lot more positive compared to N. I said before that N seems to kinda look up towards J and with how she treated him, he really didn't have to react the way he did but he?? Still likes her and is just happy to see her.

The fandom really made her worse than she actually is and it's so bothersome.

Like I said before, I highly doubt that J's behavior is a standard thing. Yes, she can be mean. Yes, she treated N terrible. But remember, they all got punished in the mansion because of him. Half of the time, she was just following her orders and J is not the kind of type to do things without reason.

Even when she tells him he is useless and terrible in that flashback? I still think he messed up somehow that made her react violently like that. Because so far, they have shown us that J's behavior is not without reason.

[4m4zing-gracie]

Uzi Doorman: How unnecessary romance can ruin a character (Part 1)

This is no flack to Uzi, nor is it to any NUzi shippers (ship what you want, I may be an eNVy lover and I'm happy you got what you wanted, I just hate how it was handled in the show), but can we all just talk about how much the unnecessary romance subplot + the inclusion of it in the show in general absolutely butchered Uzi's character?

I hope to god this gets put under an automatic 'read more/expand' thing, 'cause this is gonna get long.

But in case it doesn't cue the obligatory 'read more'!

Thank you.

Now, I remember watching the pilot and loving the character and the premise, as well as the dynamics in the show. Uzi was one of the characters that stuck out to me the most and was arguably my favourite before that title was given to V in episode three. She was determined to murder the company as well as armies of their other killer robots to save her colony, even if she had no skills AND at the cost of her own life, and she is absolutely willing to take in the robots that are just as much victims in all of this as the worker drones (eg. N).

I overall like to think that despite her flaws, and what her spiteful personality seems to show and probably on the contrary to what she would claim if she talks to anyone about it, Uzi's a much better person than she lets on. Not the most altruistic obviously, but still better than most people in the show. Hell, she didn't kill V on the spot like she did with J, not only because her railgun was still charging, but also because she knew N liked her and doing anything to V would make him sad.

Uzi overall was strong, independent, and didn't take BS from anyone, and despite her abrasiveness was overall wanting the best for robotkind, even willing to team up with those who had been hurt by them to show them the light. And that is what drew me to her and made me like her.

Then comes The Promening. Uzi, who was terrified of N and what he, V and J could be just an episode ago, is meeting up with him again, and what does she do? Ask him to go with her to prom, all blushy-faced and everything, despite having been terrified of him a moment ago. No buildup, no episode dedicated to them making up and realizing that it's okay and they can figure out what is wrong together, just.... out of nowhere crush. And while you could argue that she still needed him there anyways because of the looming danger of whatever Doll and Lizzy were planning, it's still not necessary, and I hate how it continues to stay throughout the episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, your first indication that this next bunch of episodes gonna get long and arduous.

Up next is Cabin Fever. Not my favourite episode-- I mean, it's no Absolute End in terms of garbage-- but not my favourite either.

Okay, so Uzi's learned that the plot is thickening and that she has some kind of solver thing, and so does Doll. So now, she's trying to get some answers about what this thing that she and Doll have is by looking around the camp that her father recommended checking out.

We start with more unnecessary blushing (seriously, where the fuck did this crush come from)?! and then Uzi goes off to find the cabin where she might get answers. Unfortunately, no results.

We then get a moment between her and V. Uzi and V obviously don't see eye to eye (honestly, they needed an episode or a moment where they talk properly and get a better understanding of each other). Uzi wants answers but finds that V is some annoying parasite that only cares about herself and her stomach, and likewise V does not like Uzi, being jealous of her and not wanting her to get involved with the past, as V thinks she knows what is best for N and is trying to 'protect him' (which Uzi does not know why).

N and V are already getting along with the other campers outside, something Uzi envies because they rarely acknowledge her existence at best, or treat her like a monster at worst. In this moment, V is hammering the point home by saying how Uzi needs to stop 'being creepy' and that she plans to make the latter her next victim for sneaking around and snooping, and that N will move on from her. After all, if what she has said is true, the guy has made friends with rocks before!

Long story short, Uzi gets possessed by the Solver and goes crazy and eats people, and we see her almost about to kill V (something I doubt she'd do if she had free will, as it would make N upset). Only when N swoops in to save them both is when she manages to break free. Blah Blah Blah, N and Uzi have a moment, and they both hug it out together, and they crushily hold hands*, end of episode.

*- Uzi, you didn't need to do that because again, WHERE DID THIS CRUSH COME FROM?

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Apologies in advance for the jarring Picrew, but I needed something to convey my facial expressions rn because I don't have nearly enough unhappy drawings of my 'Sona to show it.

So, as I have mentioned before, I'm an eNVy shipper. And so with this info in mind, you're probably thinking "Well, she's probably making this post to justify why eNVy should be canon". And in another universe where I'm an even bigger bitch than I already am, maybe I would be. But... that's not why we're here. We're talking about how Uzi was utterly RUINED as a character.

So to start, she was great at first. Loveable character, rebellious, surprised her plushie wasn't the second one made because of her popularity.

But then this crush came out of nowhere and so I begin to fear for the future of the show. As I'm watching this, I am partially honestly going "who are you and what have you done with my Uzi?" because while it's good that Uzi is still focusing on the mystery to some degree, it seems that now she's also starting to obsess over an out-of-nowhere crush that has ZERO buildup or anything similar. For god's sake, N and Disassembly drones in general were the objects of her fears at the end of episode two!

I GET that the show is about Uzi and N's friendship, I really do. And I like shows that are buddy-centric. But why does this random romance bullshit have to be squirmed in, when the show was already perfect without any signs of it? Seriously, Liam, this is not how you take things!

Unfortunately, it's only gonna get more arduous from there. So uh... I dunno, "thanks for coming to my TED Talk, stay tuned and keep an eye out for a part two coming later"? I dunno.

[azritesx3]

“A Devil’s Love” Chapter 2: Show Me All I Don’t Know

Description: Chloe’s best friend is back, and Lucifer’s charm can’t seem to affect her either. Is she also a miracle child? Or something…more? [Story starts during S2 Ep4, Female Reader Insert]

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AN: Updated March 14, 2020 - Grammar AN: Updated July 14, 2020 - Grammar/Minor changes

Rating: Teen Warning[s]: Swearing

Show Timeline: Season 2 Episode 9

Spotify Playlist /// AO3 Fanfiction Net Wattpad DeviantArt

Tag List: @ayanna-wild​, @anushay1998, @emiwrites3reads​, @i-am-canada-13​, @heart-of-pots-and-pans​, @tinyybiceps, @jessicarene99​, @lucifersnipnips​, @givemebooksorgivemedeath​, @sailor-earth-1

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To say your first couple months back home was a walk in the park would be a big fat lie.

Nothing bad really happened. Well, except when your BFF got in that bad car accident and you swore up and down it had something to do with you, but she pushes you away and says she's fine and can't stand you and Lucifer taking the blame.

Why would Lucifer be taking the blame, you thought. So, you ask him. Like any sane person would do who was overprotective of their friends. If you ended up being wrong about this guy being “good” and “nice”, you had to get him away from Chloe.

But no. He's not bad. Just crazy. What with continuing with his “Devil” shtick and claiming it was one of his “Angel” brothers trying to take what his father, aka “God”, gave him in exchange for a favor.

And you thought you were crazy before, but it wasn't true for you, so why would it be true for him?

Oh, and after that whole fiasco poor Chloe finds out that her real father’s killer has been free all this time. No reprimanding, no worries. Just a cop killer who got to continue his life freely. Turns out the killer was Warden Perry Smith, and he was responsible for many set up kills. You remember the failure you felt when Smith managed to destroy his scent from your hounds. The bastard didn’t get far, though. Maze managed to easily capture him, and from then on became the LAPD’s number one bounty hunter.

But, with all that bad came a lot of good. Not easily, of course. It's hard work trying to find a suitable building in the perfect location for your next veterinarian hospital. You, with the help of your trusty sidekick Alice, managed to find just that though.

Next, while you sorted out the building paperwork and searched for a good construction company, you had to find a place to live. That, thankfully, went much quicker than finding the next “Circle of Life Veterinary Clinic” building.

Chloe kept trying to convince you to move in with her instead of Maze, but you politely declined. You didn't want to be the one who made that badass fighter homeless. Besides, you like having your own space.

And to top all that off, you got your old job back as the Captain of the K9 division of the LAPD. You missed training your dogs & officers, plus having that paycheck, the paycheck from the “COL VC” in New York, and the future paycheck of the next “COL VC” building allowed you to not stress financially.

Currently, you are standing in “COL VC #2” watching the progress come along. You smile as you see how well, and fast, things are going. If this keeps up, you'll be able to open up within the month.

Which means you and Alice need to start hiring people.

You sigh to yourself and rub your forehead, closing your eyes. First things first, you had to find some way to properly thank Lucifer for giving you the name of this construction company.

“They are a fantastic company! Did very fine work in my club. Why not come see for yourself tonight?” Lucifer looked at you like he looked at Alice the first day.

“Not a chance.” You smiled at him and crossed your arms, building up a barrier.

“Oooh, playing hard to get are we?” He licked his lips and looked you up and down, “I like it!”

“Ok. This was obviously a bad idea.” You huffed and started to leave Chloe’s desk.

“Wait, K9!” You stopped and turned back towards him, “I’m sorry, truly.” he looked sincere and placed his right hand over his heart, “Here.” He grabbed the yellow sticky notes and a pen from Chloe’s desk and began to write.

“Just tell the owner that you’re with me.” He handed you the note and smiled, “He'll give you a large discount, I'm sure.”

You looked down at the note and couldn't help the thought of how beautiful Lucifer’s handwriting was, “Thank you, Lucifer.” You looked up at him and smiled, a genuine one this time.

“You’re quite welcome, my dear.” He gave you a genuine smile back, then turned flirtatious again, “Though I would like you to come to my club, so you can see what those constructors are really capable of. It’s so sad their talents will be wasted on an animal clinic.”

“Uh-huh.” You shook your head, still smiling, and walked away.

Your phone’s ringtone knocks you back to the present. The call says it’s Chloe, but when you answer it-

“SOME DADDY KILLER BOY IS GOING TO MAKE ME HOMELESS!” Lucifer’s voice blares through your phone so loud that the workers around turn towards you and you swear your ear is bleeding.

“Sooo, you think the perfect way to stop this ‘Daddy Killer Boy’ is to make me go deaf? Well, you’re doing very well so far.” You bring your phone to your none deaf ear and rub the now deaf one.

“The Detective won’t help me-” you can hear Chloe yelling at him in the background saying to give back her phone. You hear a bit of a scuffle, and can imagine Chloe shaking her head as she gets her phone.

“Sorry about that, Earth. Calling you is the only way I can think of to help Lucifer.” You can tell Chloe is saying that last part to him directly, and can just imagine his eye roll.

“What’s going on?”

“Our new case victim is Dean Cooper.”

“That LA real-estate tycoon guy?”

“Yup. It looks like he died having dinner with his possible killer. The killer looks to have shattered a champagne glass and stuck a shard in Dean's throat.”

“Ouch.”

“Ella’s still at the crime scene trying to piece the glass back together in order to get fingerprints.”

“Oh, Ella.” You smile and shake your head, “What a good little scientist.”

“Agreed, if a bit crazy.” Chloe holds in a laugh, “Well, Mr. Cooper was the one who owned the block that Lucifer’s nightclub is on and it seems like Mr. Eric Cooper, Dean's son, is pretty quick in reclaiming his father’s properties.”

“I see…So I’m guessing he’s suspect numero uno?”

“Yes, but this is why I’m calling you,” Chloe gives an audible stressful sigh, “I just...I can’t seem to keep my mind on this case with the court on Perry Smith right around the corner. Plus, with my mom flying in tonight and Dan being busy with a bomb case-”

“You don’t need to say anymore, Chlo. I’ll take care of this. Just send me the address to the crime scene and I’ll take over.”

“Thank you, Earth.” You can just hear the weight lift off your BFF’s shoulder, “I’ll text you the details right now. I owe you one.”

“This is what friends do for each other, Chloe. You should know that by now.” Before you hang up you can hear Lucifer in the background, “Hurry along, K9! Every minute I get closer to homelessness!”

“Proper thank you, here I come.”

----------------------------------------

As you pull up to the crime scene you see the medics carrying away a body bag, aka Dean Cooper. So there will be no need to worry about seeing a dead man, but there is an angry British man heading straight towards you.

“Finally! Does my homelessness mean nothing to you?” Lucifer says, but despite being upset he still opens your car door and helps you out.

“Lucifer you’re, like, a zillionaire or whatever.” You nod your thanks and you both head inside the dead man's house, “I highly doubt you’d let yourself be ‘homeless’ for more than an hour, at most.”

“But this is LUX, K9.” You try to ignore Lucifer’s desperation and come up beside Ella, who was just about to complete the champagne glass puzzle.

“Annnd, that’s how we do it!” Ella manages to place the last piece perfectly, stands up and shoves her fist in front of your face, “Ta’vonlu!”

“A puzzle solver and a Trekkie?” You laugh and smile, “Ella, I’m liking you more and more each day.”

“Woohoo! Fellow Trekkie!” Ella’s hand goes from a fist to the Vulcan greeting and you return it. Lucifer’s eye roll is incredibly loud.

Ella gets back to work on scanning the glass for fingerprints and in the meantime, an officer hands you a folder of all info found about Dean Cooper. As you skim through the words you become disappointed, and impressed. It was amazing that a shark like Cooper had no record whatsoever.

“So, can we go to this baby shark now to arrest him and get my home back?” Lucifer stands in front of you, hands intertwined together in front of him.

“We don’t have any proof with which to arrest Eric.” You look at him as you hand the folder back to the officer.

“He has motive. That's all the proof you need!”

“Actually, you may have more than that!” Ella calls out and you go to her. She points to her laptop screen where it clearly states that Eric Cooper’s fingerprints were on the glass that killed his father.

“There you go! Come on chop chop!” Lucifer pushes you by the small of your back out the door and to your car, “We’ve got a baby shark to arrest!”

----------------------------------------

You barley park and shut off the engine before Lucifer is out and heading towards the Cooper building, “Lucifer wait!”

“You know, you drive just as slow as the Detective?” Lucifer stops and waits for you to catch up.

“If by slow you mean ‘following traffic laws’ then yeah.” Lucifer just scoffs, “Look, Lucifer.” he looks at you with a bit of interest, he’s never heard you sound serious before.

“I understand how you’re feeling right now, I do,” you lightly touch his arm, “but Chloe has told me how you get sometimes and let me tell you: threatening to tear this guy up or torture him is not going to help you get LUX back, or this case.”

“Very well.” He returns his hand to your lower back and guides you, “I solemnly promise that the man will remain unthreatened and unharmed.”

The sound of a crash and a car alarm blaring causes you both to stop and turn around.

Eric Cooper lays on top of some poor civilian’s car. His body bleeding from almost every pore.

“Not me.” Lucifer holds up his hands in fake surrender.

“Well, shit.”

----------------------------------------

You did miss solving cases. Really, you did.

But this one was turning into a real sack of ass.

Eric Cooper was hospitalized for a full twenty-four hours before the hospital allowed his wife, Christi Cooper, to take him home.

A whole twenty-four hours closer to Lucifer's homelessness, and he would not shut up about it.

You and Lucifer arrive at the Cooper house to question Eric and Christi, but all you two got was another real estate shark’s name, Eleanor Bloom. Plus an extra case of nausea for both of you at the sappy love between Eric and Christi.

Eleanor, it turns out, was a real shark. Making sure Eric wasted no time in selling her that property that his father had been sitting on. That property in question was LUX, and even with Lucifer’s charm she was not giving up that land.

Which pissed Lucifer enough to abandon you with this case. Chloe offered to help, but with her father’s killer’s court so close there was no way you were going to burden her even more. You already swore you would solve this case for her, and you meant it.

You follow up on Eleanor's lead, alone, about some shady numbers found in her accountant's books that looked like someone was hiding money. Turns out that money went to some private investigator Dean had hired to investigate someone, but the man wouldn't tell you who. You had a hunch though.

Your hunch had to be put on hold though as one of your officers comes up to you. He says they got a call about an illegal party happening at a building that was supposed to be abandoned by now.

Of course he would.

----------------------------------------

You stand before the “supposed to be abandoned” LUX nightclub with an entourage of your officers, and just sigh.

Here we go.

You have your men walk in first with you close behind, and you can hear the music cut off and people booing as soon as they see your men.

“Awww!” You hear Lucifer’s voice clearly over the crowd, “Stormtroopers have arrived, everyone! Don’t worry I’ll deal with the boys in blue.” Lucifer walks towards the officers, “You are the boys in blue, yes? The fun boys in blue aren’t due for another hour.” He chuckles and shows a wad of cash in front of your main guy, Officer Miller.

Miller just gives Lucifer a side smile and looks to his side. Lucifer follows his eye movement and his smile disappears as you walk up.

“K9?”

“I know him, Miller. I got it from here.” You ignore Lucifer and look to your officer.

“You’re sure ma’am?”

“Oh yeah.” Now you look at Lucifer as you pat Miller on the shoulder, “He’s harmless.” You don’t speak again until all the officers have left, “I got to say Lucifer, I’m disappointed.”

You think your eyes might be deceiving you, but Lucifer Morningstar actually looks ashamed. You don't know why, but you actually can’t stand to see him like that.

“I mean,” you throw your hands up and turn around a full 360, “this is the first time I come to your club and you’ve got no music playing, and no one dancing around with no worries?”

You smile at him, cross your arms and raise a brow, “Tisk tisk. I may have to leave a one-star review afterall.”

“Oh ho ho!” Lucifer's light returns in him, “Well, I can’t have that now can I?” He’s smiling ear to ear now, “TURN IT UP!”

The crowd cheers as the music comes back full blast. Everyone resumes their dancing, drinking, laughing, and you can’t help but laugh right along with them.

“K9!” You turn to Lucifer who gives you that beautiful smile, “I didn't know you had it in you!”

“There’s a lot you don't know about me, Lucifer.” You smile back at him.

“Evidently! Come on,” Lucifer grabs your arm and pulls you to the dance floor.

“Oh no, I really shou-”

“Come on, K9!” Lucifer laughs and drags you to the dance floor, “Show me all I don't know!”

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“Oh, now that’s interesting.” Linda watches you and Lucifer dance away together.

“What is?” Mrs. Charlotte Richards, well actually the body of Charlotte Richards that now belongs to the Goddess of all Creation [aka God’s ex-wife and Lucifer’s mother], looks down at the tiny doctor.

“Oh, nothing much.” Linda looks at her and gives a small smile before turning her attention back on you two, “I just thought of something I have to ask a patient of mine about.”

As Linda drinks her martini the Goddess follows her eye line sight and stares at you dancing with her son. Her eye twitches.

“My son was right about you, Doctor.” The Goddess smiles wickedly, “You are incredibly insightful.”

[vulpinmusings]

Letters from Buxcord #3 - Bayou Basilisk

Mystery 3 of my group Monster of the Week campaign (See Episodes 1 and 2 here) concluded last night, wherein we had a most unpleasant experience in the local bayou.

Samantha,

I’ve struggled over whether or not to write this letter for weeks, uncertain if it’s worth the effort if I can’t even send it or the previous ones to you.  I just decided to keep carrying on for two reasons: because I know you’ll want to know my stories once I return and I’ll appreciate having these letters on hand as notes, and because writing them will make me retain a hope of returning eventually.  

I make a promise, I will get back to Taryn.

I just don’t know if it’ll be through my own efforts.

So, why was I so down?  I went to see Madam Weaver to see if she was as informed as her note claimed.  She lives in a somewhat run-down part of Buxcord, but her own house is in great shape.  Weaver’s an older lady and definitely well attuned to the ways of magic, although I can’t quite place what her personal style is yet.  She gave me some insight into this universe’s magic, and apparently the streams are individually far more potent than I’m accustomed to using, so my issues are less a matter of mis-aligned Weaving than creating overloaded Weaves.  That’s going to take a fair bit of time to adjust to; I may have to unlearn everything I’ve assumed about the ratio of strings in a Weave to the power and versatility of spells.

It could also be a result of magic not being as widely used here as it is in Taryn or most of the ‘verses along the Chain, or part of the fallout of recent events. Madam Weaver told me that not too long ago, but before I arrived in this universe, there had been an explosion of magic on the scale of a uranium bomb which had caused a kind of “refreshing” of the magical energy in the world.  That wave I suffered through prior to the incident with the pig-faced murder ghost might have been an aftershock of that explosion; if so, it’s the first one to have occurred.

None of that is what distressed me though.  What did it was Madam Weaver’s knowledge of inter-universe portals.  To summarize, if I wanted to create a stable portal to Taryn from Buxcord, I would need to sacrifice something that originates from my destination universe. Something more… substantial than some of my cards or other personal possessions. I’d have to give up part of myself.  The only other option right now is to sit tight and wait for someone – be it Rubia or that skvetchte Raposinho that got me into this mess in the first place or our friends at the end of the Chain – to figure out how to pinpoint my location in the multiverse and cast a portal my way.  And that without any of you actually having this letter in front of you to inform you of my situation!

Also, “True Name” magic is apparently more than just a charlatan's facade for coercion techniques in this universe.  I haven’t had any reason to question my defenses against such things here yet, except for the fact that I did get mind-controlled that one time by a form of magic I still don’t fully grasp...

Bah re...

Might as well put what just happened into this letter, try to end it on a more upbeat note.

Although magic is not a commonly accepted reality around here, I’ve managed to establish enough of a reputation as a solver of problems to pull in enough money to afford the rent on an apartment.  You’d laugh to see how empty it is, but I at least managed to acquire a couch so I have somewhere soft to sleep.  A few days after moving in, I was awakened by a knock on my door.  It was a young man leaning on a cane, one of my new neighbors who goes by Rocky.  He asked me for my help in locating his missing twin brother, William, who had left the previous evening claiming a sudden need to test one of the new boats at Bayou Boating, and had not returned.  Always eager to be doing something, and needing a bit of a refresher to the finances, I set off immediately.

My first clue that things were going to be more interesting than a simple missing person’s case was bumping into the ever-uncanny Nollthep just outside Bayou Boating.  Once again, the fellow was on an errand for his mysterious boss, who wanted a mage to lend them a hand.

I must admit, I’m growing slightly suspicious of Nollthep.  Last time we worked together, he was seeking a Wiccan, and after the pig-face was dealt with I saw Penelope Clemonte’s name on the official list of its victims, when I know she was in perfect health.  Now, here Nollthep was looking for a mage and being very intent on the word “hand.”  Partly out of my ever-honest nature and partly out of a desire to try and protect any innocents, I volunteered that I am a mage.

We went inside the Bayou Boating storefront to find the last member of the unofficial “Buxcord Weirdness Magnet” trio, Lea, observing the company’s boss, Fitz, dressing down two of his employees over a missing boat.  When questioned, none of them knew where William was but were willing to believe he was responsible for the missing boat.  Fitz had already called in the police and was in a very bad mood, so it took a lot of fast-talk and at least one dose of Lea’s charm magic to convince him to let us go out into the bayou with another of his precious fan-driven boats.  He only agreed on the condition that one of the employees, Piper, came with us and drove the boat.

Nollthep, in his usual straightforward style, dragged poor Piper out to the boat and hacked the mooring rope apart before anyone could make a move to untie it properly.  As we started out, following the usual route used for testing new boats, Piper and Lea realized they knew each other from early childhood and spent a while catching up.  I didn’t pay them too much mind, being more focused on looking for signs of William and his boat.  I don’t recall what I said, exactly, but some comment I made to Nollthep’s rambling prompted him to pull out his own eyes and swap them around, much to Lea’s horror. Somehow, Piper failed to notice the trick. How Nolly’s managed to last so long with next to nobody suspecting him of not being human, I may never know.

As we drove by the second of many islands in the bayou, we spotted a boat upturned on the shore.  Piper brought us in for a closer look, but after a thorough search of the island we found no signs of William or any other human presence.  As we boarded our boat, I saw Rocky in the near distance in a small motor boat, so we went over to ask him what he was doing.  After all, he’d asked me to do the bulk of the foot-work.  As Piper was helping him onto our craft, Lea spotted something moving in the water and floored the accelerator, nearly knocking the rest of us off our feet, and ramping off the back of the 20-foot long python that was starting to breach the surface.  As she was not sitting in the driver’s chair, Lea’s control over the boat was lacking, and we ended up whirling around and crashing into the snake and throwing everyone but Rocky into the water.  Nollthep sank like a rock and stayed under for a few seconds before teleporting himself back onto the boat.  As for myself, I managed to call up a swell of water to shove the snake back long enough for Rocky to drive over to us. Nollthep locked eyes with the snake and froze for a crucial moment before throwing a handful of his exploding powder, buying enough time for Piper to get out of the water.  As Lea was trying to follow suit, however, the snake charged in and slammed the boat, launching Lea into the air, where she proceeded to defy gravity until Rocky hooked his cane around her ankle and pulled her in.

The snake – basilisk, rather, for that’s what I soon determined it was – tried to wrap me in its coils as I struggled toward the boat, but Nollthep caught it around the neck with his chain of handkerchiefs, freeing me to climb back aboard and give the basilisk a perfunctory fireball in the face. Piper took control of the boat and whipped us around to head back to the docks at speed.  The basilisk made chase as Nollthep threw his cards at it to try and convince it to leave.  It didn’t break off, though, until Rocky leaned against Nolly for balance, raised his cane, and channeled a beam of ice magic through it at the basilisk.

I do seem to be attracting all the local mages as hoped, albeit slowly and sporadically.

The police still hadn’t arrived when we returned, and Fitz was none too happy to learn we’d basically accomplished nothing of note.  William was still MIA, the stolen boat was still marooned, and there was skvetchte big snake swimming around Bayou Boating’s tour area.  Actually, the snake bothered him far less than it should have, since he declared he fully intended to open the tours in two days’ time as scheduled, man-eating snake or no man-eating snake.

As we stepped outside to discuss our next move, Nollthep unexpectedly blinked away for about a minute and returned with a white dove that took an immediate and insistent interest in me and Rocky.  Nollthep claimed the bird, which he called Sven, was a new friend, but he seemed nervous and more jittery than usual with it around.

I wanted to consult with Madam Weaver about how to deal with the basilisk, to confirm its weaknesses and find out where to obtain what we would need, but I was uncertain about introducing her to Nollthep just yet, so I convinced him and Lea to let me go alone.  The Madam informed me that basilisks are fatally allergic to weasel blood and griffon tears and that the lab that had produced the Santa-squatch and not-deer from back around Yuletide might be able to provide the materials.

When I returned to Bayou Boating, I found Lea yelling at Nollthep about him attempting to kidnap Rocky via teleport and misplacing the man.  The police had also arrived in my absence and Lea had barely managed to convince them there was a dangerous snake in the bayou, so they were waiting on Animal Control rather than heading out in their own boat.

After assisting Lea in brow-beating Nolly into teleporting around town to find Rocky, Lea and I made our way to the lab.  Nollthep popped into the lab well ahead of us, much to the annoyance of Professor Thomas, before rejoining us just outside and proceeding to annoy the professor again via the intercom.  I shoved Nolly aside and told the professor our reason for coming, and he invited Lea and me in.  Nollthep had to stay outside, as Thomas believed he’d done something bad to the former Professor Case.  So, that was another mark against Nolly…

As it turns out, Professor Thomas’s lab holds a wide variety of tissue and fluid samples from all kinds of creatures, mundane and Mythic, explaining where Case had acquired the materials to make his Christmas monsters.  Thomas handed over a vial of weasel blood without much comment, but was hesitant to give up his only sample of griffon tears, as he was hoping to use them to save the beasts from either current or eminent extinction.  We managed to come to an agreement: I could have the tears in exchange for bringing Thomas a sample from the basilisk, Nollthep, or both.  It was a fair enough deal.

Back at Bayou Baoting, Lea went inside to work her magic on Fitz so we could take a boat out again. While she was doing that, Nollthep got the bright idea of building a boat of our own using the wood from the docks.  He ripped out a good part of a pier before I managed to stop him, and he only did a half-baked job at fixing the damage, all the while twitching under the stare of the dove that I’m sure is not actually a dove which was still insisting on using me as a perch.

Lea came back with Piper in tow, and we launched back into the bayou.  As we neared the island where we’d found the basilisk the first time, Nollthep saw something hanging in a tree and swam over for a closer look.  As the boat drew nearer, I saw Rocky’s cane floating in the water, fished it out, and then looked up to see that it was Rocky himself stuck in the tree.  I tried to levitate him down, but I must have over-corrected for the power difference because the spell fizzled quickly.  Lea jumped out to catch Rocky and wound up floating under her own power again.  As I held out the cane for them to use to haul themselves back aboard, the basilisk’s head emerged from behind the tree and locked eyes with me.

Some say the stare of a basilisk is instant death, but I can say with authority that the Buxcord variety at least merely instills a partial paralysis.  Lea panicked and tried to fly away, dropping Rocky onto the boat and drawing the beast’s attention.  It lunged at her as Nollthep, who had teleported back to the boat, tried to hit it with his explosive powder and only succeeded in momentarily blinding everyone on board.

While I struggled to overcome the double disadvantage of sluggish muscles and abused retinas, the basilisk bit Lea in the leg and pulled her into the water. She she reacted by causing a nearby tree to slam into and ensnare the snake.  As Lea climbed aboard the boat, Nollthep lassoed the basilisk to try and pull it closer and I applied a Tangler to twist its head around for a dose of weasel blood and griffon’s tears.

Lea, in a panic and maybe a bit delirious from basilisk venom, attempted to fly away.  Nollthep pulled her back to the boat so he and Rocky could attempt first-aid. Nollthep revealed a rare moment of actual knowledge in attempting the method of sucking the venom out of Lea’s wounds, which he actually managed to do.  He then swallowed the venom, revealing the incompleteness of his knowledge.  Rocky’s contribution was to try and seal the bite wound with ice.

As this was going on, I was force-feeding the basilisk.  The weasel blood and griffon tears didn’t kill it immediately, but it still had a violent reaction. Convulsions and blood from the mouth, all that good “dying from the inside out” stuff.  Lea and I sped the process up via another tree slammed into the basilisk’s back and an explosive fireball to the head.

Meanwhile, Nollthep tried to expel the venom from his system as quickly as possible and shed around half his skin in the process, much to Rocky’s disgust.

I grabbed a floating chunk of basilisk from the water and bit of Nolly hide, figuring there was no sense in not giving Thomas both of the things he’d requested if they were both available.

Once we got back to shore, Rocky and Piper loaded Lea into a golf cart and took her to the hospital, adamantly denying Nollthep’s request to join them.  Once the two of us were alone, putting aside that creepy dove, I took the opportunity to lay out a long list of advice for Nollthep regarding his erratic, uncanny, and decidedly not-human behavior.  He thanked me for the input, and we went our separate ways.

I had pegged Nollthep for a non-human from the start, and that engendered a feeling of camaraderie with him, but I find myself starting to question the wisdom of treating him as an ally.  Even ignoring his version of normal behavior, which has grown harder and harder to excuse over the months, there have been two instances of people who Nollthep has shown high interest in and survived encounters with dangerous entities only to later come to harm.  Once is chance and twice is coincidence, but if something happens to Rocky or someone at Bayou Boating…

I’m not sure what I’ll do, yet, but it probably won’t end well.

So much for upbeat endings.

- Ash

[statetalks]

Who Were The Republicans That Voted For Obamacare

Actual Events That Occurred As A Result Of The Affordable Care Act 2011 To 2014

January, 2011: In 2011, insurance companies had to ensure the value for premium payments. If insurance companies did not spend at least 80% to 85% of premiums on care the difference is sent to customers in a refund.

January 2011: A Florida judge rules that elements of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

November 14, 2011: The US Supreme Court agrees to hear arguments in the Obamacare case brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. It argues that elements of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

January, 2014: Health Affairs published its most recent analysis of Medical Loss Ratio performance by major insurers.

March, 2014: The New York Times reports that the U.S. Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data changed its annual survey so thoroughly that it became difficult to measure the effects of President Obamas health care law. 

How Different Groups Of Republicans Voted

Many hard-line conservatives, including Freedom Caucus members and recipients of campaign contributions from the caucus’s political action committee, expressed opposition to the bill in its original form, but voted yes on Thursday after several changes to the legislation. Much of the Republican opposition to the bill came from members whose districts voted for Hillary Clinton.

Affordable Health Care For America Act

Jump to navigationJump to searchPatient Protection and Affordable Care ActAmerican Health Care Act

This article is part of a serieson

The Affordable Health Care for America Act was a that was crafted by the United States House of Representatives of the 111th United States Congress on October 29, 2009. The bill was sponsored by Representative Charles Rangel. At the encouragement of the Obama administration, the 111th Congress devoted much of its time to enacting reform of the United States’ health care system. Known as the “House bill, HR 3962 was the House of Representatives’ chief legislative proposal during the health reform debate.

On December 24, 2009, the Senate passed an alternative health care bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act . In 2010, the House abandoned its reform bill in favor of amending the Senate bill ” rel=”nofollow”>reconciliation process) in the form of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Senators Who Had Voted Against Obamacare Repeal Are Now Wavering

Matt Fuller

WASHINGTON Theres nothing like a deadline to get things moving on Capitol Hill, and with a Sept. 30 expiration date for the bill that want to use for an Affordable Care Act repeal, Senate Republicans who once seemed resolutely opposed to even the most modest Obamacare repeal suddenly sounded less resolute Monday.

The proposal authored by Sens. Lindsey Graham , Bill Cassidy and other Republican colleagues would still likely result in millions losing coverage. The bill would still cut Medicaid, albeit over a longer timeline, and states could still choose to undermine protections for people with pre-existing conditions. But the measure, attached to a reconciliation bill that allows a simple majority vote, would give states more flexibility in deciding those cuts and coverage decisions.

That flexibility has inspired Sen. Rand Paul to come out strongly against the legislation, castigating the bill as a rebranding of Obamacare. Conservatives should say no, Paul Monday.

The proposal, however, is seemingly less repellent to Sen. Lisa Murkowski , one of the three Senate Republicans who voted against the skinny repeal in July, along with Susan Collins and John McCain . Murkowski told HuffPost on Monday that shes undecided on Graham-Cassidy, as the measure is known, and that she and her staff were still looking to see how Alaska would make out under the bill.

Whether we repeal and replace Obamacare comes down to a few key senators, Meadows said.

Employer Mandate And Part

Health insurance mandate

The employer mandate applies to employers of more than fifty where health insurance is provided only to the full-time workers. Critics claimed it created a perverse incentive to hire part-timers instead. However, between March 2010 and 2014, the number of part-time jobs declined by 230,000 while the number of full-time jobs increased by two million. In the public sector full-time jobs turned into part-time jobs much more than in the private sector. A 2016 study found only limited evidence that ACA had increased part-time employment.

Several businesses and the state of Virginia added a 29-hour-a-week cap for their part-time employees, to reflect the 30-hour-or-more definition for full-time worker. As of 2013, few companies had shifted their workforce towards more part-time hours . Trends in working hours and the recovery from the Great Recession correlate with the shift from part-time to full-time work. Other confounding impacts include that health insurance helps attract and retain employees, increases productivity and reduces absenteeism; and lowers corresponding training and administration costs from a smaller, more stable workforce. Relatively few firms employ over 50 employees and more than 90% of them already offered insurance.

Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Laws Ripped From ‘the Handmaid’s Tale’

Then there are the political headaches that would be triggered by the overturning of Roe: the likely countermobilization of liberals and alienation of many moderates suddenly witnessing the painful realities of abortion bans, and stronger pushes in Republican ranks for a total national abortion ban and other extreme measures.

The Republicans incendiary antiabortion rhetoric could come back to haunt. If abortion constitutes the murdering of babies, as antiabortion language insists, and theres no longer a Roe v. Wade getting in the way, arent the Republicans obliged to ban it in every instance and every place, whether through the courts or the political process?

Will Biden get in the ring?: Patients shouldn’t have to fight this hard for an abortion 

Expect emboldened right-wing politicians to push more legislation that sounds like its been ripped from the scripts of The Handmaids Tale.” Abortion bans that make no exceptions for victims of rape or incest  a hallmark of the Mississippi law heading to the high court this fall. Bills like one that advanced recently in Pennsylvania that focuses not just on abortions but miscarriages, too  categorizing miscarriages as deaths and requiring health care facilities to file death certificates and get burial permits. As if the would-be mother werent already suffering enough, now this extra burden, served up with a sinister insinuation about her miscarriage. 

Rep Tom Reed Of New York

Reed, a leader of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, broke with his party on a handful of votes relating to the government shutdown at the start of the year. He told Roll Call after Wednesdays vote that he was concerned about his partys position on health care heading into 2020.

Hopefully, maybe, this puts a marker down with our leadership and with the Republican Party in the House and Senate, as well as across the country, that we owe it to the American people to show in black and white how were going to fix health care, he said.

The DCCC is not targeting Reed, who won re-election by 8 points in 2018.

Trump carried Reeds district, which stretches along the border with Pennsylvania, by 15 points. Reeds 2018 opponent, cybersecurity expert Tracy Mitrano, is running again. Inside Elections rates the race Solid Republican.

Trump: We’ll Soon See If Republicans Will ‘step Up To The Plate’ On Health Care

I’m not going to vote for something that’s a scaled down version, that’s a political punt,” Graham said earlier Tuesday. The South Carolina Republican will vote for the motion to proceed but added that a final product to fix the health care system should go through “regular order.”

Collins said the proposal wasnt described at the weekly Senate GOP policy lunch.

And so apparently that is an amendment that the leader would offer at the end, she said. I have no idea whats going into that.

And Republicans are considering making further changes to the repeal-and-replace plan. Administration officials and senators are discussing adding as much as $100 billion more to earlier drafts to help low-income people with premiums, Republicans said.

Before Tuesday’s vote, McConnell urged senators to take the first step to provide relief on this failed left-wing experiment.

Id like to reiterate what the president said yesterday. Any senator who votes against starting debate, he said, is telling America that you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare Thats a position that even Democrats have found hard to defend, McConnell said.

The fate of the vote was uncertain as recently as Tuesday morning. Paul, Heller and moderate Sen. Shelley Moore Capito waited until the final hours before the vote to announce they would support opening debate on the bill.

Heller said his support for whatever emerges later is not assured.

Rep Pete Stauber Of Minnesota

The freshman flipped a longtime Democratic seat in northeast Minnesota that Trump had carried by 16 points in 2016. Its a largely white, working-class district, where Trumps populist appeal resonated. The former Duluth police officer ran a campaign ad last year about his son Issac, who has Down syndrome, and he talked about the importance of insurance companies covering pre-existing conditions. Democrats are not targeting this seat in 2020. Inside Elections rates the race Likely Republican.

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act In 2014

October 1, 2013: Health insurance exchanges scheduled to open for 2014 enrollment begin writing policies that go into effect January 1, 2014.

January 2014: People buying insurance on their own get subsidies to help them pay their monthly insurance premiums. Premiums are allocated on a sliding scale, as determined by income. Any individual earning over 400% of the poverty level does not qualify for subsidies.

January 2014: When health insurance exchanges are operational, small business tax credits are up to 50% of premiums.

January 2014: Insurance companies are required to provide health insurance to any adult aged 19 to 64 who applies for coverage.

January 2014: To prevent people from waiting until they get sick to buy health insurance, the ACA requires all Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine. The fine starts at $95 for an individual in 2014 and goes up each year until 2016, when the fine is $695 or 2.5% of a persons annual income, whichever is greater.

January 2014: Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plans , established in 2010 are scheduled to expire on January 1, 2014 once all major ACA reforms go into effect.

What Did Trump Say About Obamacare

President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”

A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after axed parts of it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.

“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.

“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”

Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.

According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.

Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.

“The 2020 election will be pretty simple: if you want more sick people without healthcare coughing on you, vote Trump.”

Scotus Votes To Uphold Obamacare Based On A Technicality No Decision On Constitutional Issues

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Republican bid that had been backed by former President Donald Trumps administration to invalidate the Obamacare healthcare law, ruling that Texas and other challengers had no legal standing to file their lawsuit.

The 7-2 ruling authored by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer did not decide broader legal questions raised in the case about whether a key provision in the law, which is formally called the Affordable Care Act, was unconstitutional and, if so, whether the rest of the statute should be struck down.

The provision, called the individual mandate, originally required Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a financial penalty.

It marked the third time the court has preserved Obamacare since its 2010 enactment.

Breyer wrote that none of the challengers, including Texas and 17 other states and individual plaintiffs, could trace a legal injury to the individual mandate.

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Joe Bidens administration in February urged the Supreme Court to uphold Obamacare, reversing the position taken by the government under Trump, who left office in January.

After Texas and other states sued, a coalition of 20 states including Democratic-governed California and New York and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives intervened in the case to try to preserve Obamacare after Trump refused to defend the law.

A Final Vote Isn’t The Whole Story It’s Like Researching Your Ancestry And Going No Further Back Than Your Mother And Father

The day after she was one of three Republican senators to vote against her party’s proposal to repeal chunks of the Affordable Care Act, Susan Collins of Maine posted a press release that said: “Democrats made a big mistake when they passed the ACA without a single Republican vote. I don’t want to see Republicans make the same mistake.”

It was a nice nod in the direction of bipartisanship. But it also perpetuates a deceptive narrative, repeated often by Republicans, that they were completely excluded from the process that resulted in Obamacare. While it is true that no Republican voted for the final bill, it is blatantly untrue that it contains no GOP DNA. In fact, to make such an assertion is like researching your ancestry and going no further back than your mother and father. 

Not only were Republican senators deeply involved in the process up until its conclusion, but it’s a cinch that the ACA might have become law months earlier if the Democrats, hoping for a bipartisan bill, hadn’t spent enormous time and effort wooing GOP senators only to find themselves gulled by false promises of cooperation. And unlike Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s semi-secret proceedings that involved only a handful of trusted colleagues, Obamacare, until the very end of the process, was open to public scrutiny.

More:Spare America a do-over on health care. Seize the bipartisan moment.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Requirements For Health Plans And Insurers

See also: Health insurance policy cancellations since Obamacare

Coverage

The Affordable Care Act prohibited individual market insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. This policy is known as guaranteed issue. Guaranteed issue regulations had already existed for insurers selling employer-sponsored health plans, and the ACA extended this rule to the individual market as well.

The law also required insurers to allow young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until age 26. Insurers were also required to allow people in the individual market to renew their health plans each year unless they did not pay their premiums.

Benefits

The ACA required individual and small group health plans that were offered both on and off the exchanges to cover services that fall into 10 broad benefits categories, called essential health benefits:

Ambulatory patient services

Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices

Prescription drugs

Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment

Laboratory services

Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management

Pediatric services, including oral and vision care

Premiums

The ACA placed restrictions on the way individual and small group insurers set a plan’s The amount a consumer is required to pay for a health insurance plan. Premiums are usually paid monthly, quarterly or annually.:

Nancy Pelosi

Medical loss ratio

Stabilization programs

The House Has Voted 54 Times In Four Years On Obamacare Heres The Full List

Sunday marks the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, however you prefer to describe it.

While Democrats are struggling with whether to embrace the law or push for changes, Republicans are reminding voters that since they took control of the House in 2011, they’ve voted 54 times to undo, revamp or tweak the law. Here’s a full list of those votes, as provided by GOP aides. Dates with an asterisk denote a bill that also passed the Senate and was signed by President Obama:

Votes during the 112th Congress, from 2011-2012:

1.Jan. 19, 2011: The “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act” would have repealed all of the Affordable Care Act. It passed 245 to 189 with three Democrats voting for it, but was never considered by the Senate.

2.Feb. 19, 2011: The House’s version of the fiscal 2011 continuing appropriations bill included several amendments that would have “severely limited” implementation of the law. It passed 221 to 202 with no Democratic votes and was never considered in the Senate.

The next few votes were on amendments added to the appropriations bill:

3.The Rehberg Amendment #575: Prohibited funding for any employee, officer, contractor or grantee of any agencies funded under appropriations for the departments of Health and Human Services and Labor to implement provisions of the law.

4.The King Amendment #267: Ensured that no money included in the appropriations bill would be used to implement the law.

Democrats Sought To Put Gop Colleagues On Record With Symbolic Vote

Bridget BowmanSimone Pathé

Democratic congressional campaigns have already made health care an early focus of their 2020 messaging, and House Democrats bolstered that effort Wednesday with a symbolic vote that sought to once again put Republicans on record on the issue.

Eight Republicans sided with Democrats on the nonbinding resolution, which the House adopted, 240-186. The measure condemned the Trump administrations support for invalidating the 2010 health care law in its entirety. The Department of Justice, in a new filing last week, backed a Texas judges decision to strike down the law. 

Three Republicans  New Yorks Tom Reed and John Katko and Pennsylvanias Brian Fitzpatrick had voted in January to authorize the House general counsel to intervene in the lawsuit to defend the health care law. All three also voted for the resolution Wednesday.

One Democrat 15-term Minnesota Rep. Collin C. Peterson bucked his party and voted against the resolution. Hes one of the last Democrats remaining in the House who opposed the 2010 health care law and is likely the last Democrat who can hold his heavily agricultural 7th District seat.

Democrats were otherwise united in supporting the resolution, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched positive Facebook ads touting their vulnerable members votes to protect families with pre-existing conditions.

Also watch: What if we switch to a single-payer health care system?

How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare

The Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, received no Republican votes in either the Senate or the House of Representatives when it was passed in 2009. In the Senate, the bill was passed with a total of 60 votes, or 58 Democratic Party votes and 2 Independent Party votes. The House passed the legislation with 219 Democratic votes.

The Affordable Care Act received 39 votes against it in the Senate, all from Republicans. One senator abstained from voting. In the House, the ACA received 212 votes against it, with 34 coming from the Democratic Party and 178 from the Republican Party. There were enough votes for the ACA in the Senate to prevent an attempt to filibuster the bill, while the House vote required a simple majority.

The ACA originated in the Senate, though both the House and Senate were working on versions of a health care bill at the same time. Democrats in the House of Representatives were initially unhappy with the ACA, as they had expected some ability to negotiate additional changes before its passage. Since Republicans in the Senate were threatening to filibuster any bill they did not fully support, and Democrats no longer had enough seats to override the filibuster, no changes could be made. Since any changes to the legislation by the House would require it to be re-evaluated in the Senate, the original version was passed in 2009 on condition that it would be amended by a subsequent bill.

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act After 180 Days

September 23, 2010 :

Seniors are entitled to a $250 rebate to close the Medicare Part D coverage gap.

A government website is created to allow people to search for information about health insurance companies, available plans, and other essential facts.

Insurers are not permitted to exclude pre-existing conditions from coverage for children.

October 19, 2010: eHealth publishes its first in a series of resources to help uninsured children navigate differences in individual states.

History Lesson: How The Democrats Pushed Obamacare Through The Senate

Twenty-five days of consecutive session on a bill that was partisan in the sense that Republicans were angry with it, but we still had the courage of our convictions to have a debate on the floor. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer , remarks on the Senate floor, June 19, 2017

To highlight the secrecy of the GOP health-care deliberations, many Senate Democrats have pointed out that the debate over the Affordable Care Act was the second-longest consecutive session in Senate history. Schumer even sought a parliamentary inquiry on the claim, and it was confirmed by the presiding officer, Sen. Joni Ernst

The Secretary of the Senates office notes that H.R. 3590 was considered on each of 25 consecutive days of session, and the Senate Library estimates approximately 169 hours in total consideration, she said.

The longest session, Feb. 12-March 9, 1917, concerned whether to arm merchant ships during World War I, shortly before the United States entered the conflict. That lasted 26 days.

But this statistic obscures a reality: The key work on creating the Senate version of the ACA was done in secret. Lets take a trip down memory lane.

Republicans Plan Healthcare Vote; Obama And Tv Host Denounce Bill

6 Min Read

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans announced plans to vote next week on their latest bid to scuttle Obamacare even as a popular comedian who has become part of the U.S. healthcare debate denounced the bill and former President Barack Obama on Wednesday warned of real human suffering.

President Donald Trump, who has expressed frustration at the Senates failure thus far to pass legislation dismantling Obamas signature legislative achievement, said 47 or 48 Republicans back the bill, which needs 50 votes for passage in the 100-seat Senate, which his Republican Party controls 52-48.

We think this has a very good chance, Trump, who made replacing Obamacare a top 2016 campaign promise, told reporters during an appearance with Egypts president in New York.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul opposes the bill. At least five other Republicans are undecided on it: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona and Jerry Moran of Kansas.

Republican Senator John Thune on Fox News said: Were a handful of votes short of having the 50 that we need.

As they worked to gather enough votes to win, after prior legislation failed in July, congressional Republicans and the White House were on the defensive after Jimmy Kimmel used his late-night TV show to blast the proposal and call Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, one of its two sponsors, a liar.

Related Coverage

Factbox: Trump on Twitter – Graham-Cassidy bill, Luther Strange, North Korea

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/who-were-the-republicans-that-voted-for-obamacare/

[ninjagoat]

Notes on Supergirl 3x05

I knew I was going to be disappointed with this episode. I was comfortable with being disappointed with this episode. I tossed out a 3600 fic in two days safe in the knowledge I would be disappointed with this episode.

I didn't know it would actively piss me off.

Anyways, onto the notes:

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

Do...do we actually need this bus scene? What is it actually for?

Incidentally, @supergirlstats tells me the bus driver has more screentime than Winn. Shit.

Also, how did Alex catch up anyway?

Okay, is Lena learning at Catco, or running Catco? Did they do the thing where they cut the explanatory scene from the previous episode for time, and then not replace it?

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

James does, at least, have a point about journalistic integrity here; and the news/commerce struggle could be interesting.

Okay, coming in to the Sanvers argument several days in is a nice touch.

This is the longest pointless Evil Speech Of Evil ever.

I've written two posts about how Kara's friendship with Lena could come into conflict with her journalistic integrity, and this has been resolved by dumping her journalistic integrity entirely.

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

That's an important point from last year just swept away, James.

How do you step down from a company that you own, but don't have an official position in, or does she run it?

And, of course, she instantly picks the most ethical flawless position on how the story should be reported, rendering the forty or so options I thought up irrelevant.

Followed by a short speech explaining why it's okay that she's going to be drowning in self-pity and wine later.

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg

I see Catco security is as great as ever.

The entire tone of this is how unfair all this is on Lena. Except, you know, she may have poisoned some kids. There should probably be some consequences.

Here's the thing: the press conference could actually be a good scene. It's big, it's performative, it is entirely a speech about how this affects her; which would be great choices, if I didn't think the show was taking it completely seriously.

And that's why you have body armour, James

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg; you mediocre, gammon-faced sex pest.

Why are we still doing this? Why do these stories all start with Kara being right, and then the rest of it being us learning exactly how she is right?

Jeremy Jordan doing his best without dialogue in an episode in which he has, quite literally, been side-lined.

We're acknowledging Winn helped build the device, but not in any way examining how he feels about that, or how his response contrasts or conflicts with Lena's. That's just shit writing.

If anyone new to this show thinks Winn is a sociopath, I won't blame them at all.

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

Now Lena's in the depression phase of Realising You Fucked Up.

Ms. McGrath really is giving her all in this, despite how woefully dull these story choices are.

These break-up scenes, on the other hand, are delightfully offbeat. They belong on a much better show.

Here it is: a world-class problem-solver is getting drunk and feeling sorry for herself instead of channelling her incredible intellect and infinite resources into solving the actual problems related to a thing she actually did, and no one will give her a kick up the arse.

"My whole life I was a pariah, first because I was rich..." This is class-A Ivanka Trump bullshit, right here, but again, the show - and Kara - won't call her out.

I have literally dashed out better versions of this story than this.

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

So you don't even Winn for hacking anymore, Kara?

Ms. Leigh is great doing this why-i-want-kids speech.

Your friend at the FBI has a name, Kara. You used to enjoy his company.

Winn's upset he may have poisoned some kids, but he's showing up and doing the work, without whining about how it affects him. That's how you ally.

And his speech is great, but perhaps inappropriate.

And his relief that it wasn't the lead bomb.

Why wasn't Winn a bigger part of this episode, you fuckers?

You know, Ali Adler was EP for three seasons of the greatest love story ever told, and we were lucky to have her.

Who is random Asian agent? Why isn't Winn doing this dialogue? Why is he even in this scene? How long did this episode over-run?

At some point, we need to talk about how Lena went from being a well-intentioned but morally-flexible woman with her own agenda that didn't strictly speaking need Supergirl, but finds her useful; to a morally flawless Sad Puppy in constant need of rescue.

But we won't, because the fandom loves this development, and has wanked themselves half to death over it.

And now the kick up the arse. But to believe in herself. Not to make her get over herself.

Morgan Edge needs better lighting solutions.

If this is suggesting Kara might kill for Lena... FFS

Ms. McGrath more relaxed in this scene with James than I've ever seen her. This is good.

Is being eager to see how Jimmy screws up a good thing this time classed as shipping it?

Still gonna miss Maggie. And that last line! How did no-one GIF that?

'Sister.' I hate this episode, writers, but that had to feel good.

Two sisters! One of whom is betraying her trust right now, one of whom will in the near future. What could go wrong?

Alien Bar is now Hipster Bar. The Alien Bar is now a victim of gentrification.

Nice bit of Reign business at the end there.

Episodes since Winn and Lyra: 9. Tamzin Merchant has been talking about her time on Supergirl in the past tense for a while now, so I expect this number to keep going up.

Episodes since Winn and Lena: 5. I would guess this will stop at the Christmas party in 3x09, but who knows if he'll even be invited.

It was CHUCK, by the way.

Fuck you, Andrew Kreisberg.

[ucflibrary]

For the month of December, the UCF Libraries Bookshelf celebrates the favorite books of employees of the UCF Libraries. These are the books we have (and will continue to) read many times over the course of our lives. The genre for our 2017 staff favorites is mystery novels.

Click on the keep reading link below to peruse our favorite mysteries and learn where to find them.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie Ten strangers, apparently with little in common, are lured to an island mansion off the coast of Devon by the mysterious U.N. Owen. Over dinner, a record begins to play, and the voice of an unseen host accuses each person of hiding a guilty secret. That evening, former reckless driver Tony Marston is found murdered by a deadly dose of cyanide. The tension escalates as the survivors realize the killer is not only among them but is preparing to strike again and again! Suggested by David Benjamin, Special Collections and University Archives

Death Without Company by Craig Johnson When Mari Baroja is found poisoned at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, Sheriff Longmire is drawn into an investigation of her death that proves to be as dramatic as her life. Her connections to the Basque community, the lucrative coal-bed methane industry, and the personal life of the previous sheriff, Lucian Connally, lead to a complex web of half-truths and assumed allegiances. As the specter of Mari's abusive husband arises, Sheriff Longmire, aided by his friend Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Victoria Moretti, and newcomer Santiago Saizarbitoria, must connect the past to the present to find the killer among then. Suggested by Renee Montgomery, Teaching & Engagement

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follet His code name was “The Needle.” He was a German aristocrat of extraordinary intelligence—a master spy with a legacy of violence in his blood, and the object of the most desperate manhunt in history. But his fate lay in the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom—and win the war for the Nazis. . . . Suggested by Ven Basco, Research & Information Services

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other suspects. Sixteen years have passed, and Hercule Poirot is persuaded to investigate the murder. Suggested by Judy Kuhns, UCF Connect Libraries

Icelander by Dustin Long When Our Heroine’s dear friend is found murdered, it’s an obvious job for her mother, a legendary crime-solver and evil-thwarter. But her mother is dead, and Our Heroine has no interest in inheriting the business, or being chased through a sewer, or listening to skaldic karaoke, or fleeing the inhuman Refusirkir, or — But Evil has no interest in her interests, and thus: adventure ensues. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

Midnight at the Bright Ideas by Matthew J. Sullivan Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s overwhelmed shelves. But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore’s upper room, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Always Joey’s favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia? Suggested by Rachel Mulvihill, Teaching & Engagement

Sleep No More by P. D. James It's not always a question of "whodunit?" Sometimes there's more mystery in the why or how. And although we usually know the unhealthy fates of both victim and perpetrator, what of those clever few who plan and carry out the perfect crime? The ones who aren't brought down even though they're found out? And what about those who do the finding out who witness a murder or who identify the murderer but keep the information to themselves? These are some of the mysteries that we follow through those six stories as we are drawn into the thinking, the memories, the emotional machinations, the rationalizations, the dreams and desires behind murderous cause and effect. Suggested by Anna Dvorecky, Cataloging

Still Life by Louise Penny Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter. Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith Working as a private investigator after losing his leg in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike takes the case of a legendary supermodel's suspicious suicide and finds himself in a world of multi-millionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, desperate designers and hedonist pursuits. Suggested by Lindsey Ritzert, Circulation

The Dragon Man by Garry Disher A serial killer is on the loose in a small coastal town near Melbourne. Detective Inspector Hal Challis and his team must apprehend him before he strikes again. But first Challis must contend with the editor of a local news-paper who undermines his investigation at every turn and with his wife, who is attempting to resurrect their marriage through long-distance phone calls from a sanitarium where she has been imprisoned for the past eight years for attempted murder. His. The media is demanding to know what Challis is doing about the killer; his colleagues are either giving trouble or in it; and his past keeps coming back to haunt him. Suggested by Patricia Tiberri, Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery Services

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid Suspense master Val McDermid spins a psychological thriller in which a present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. After summer rains uncover a corpse bearing tattoos like those of eighteenth-century seafarers, many residents of the English Lake District can't help but wonder whether it's the body of one of the town's most legendary fugitives. Scholar and native Lakelander Jane Gresham feels compelled to finally discover the truth about the myths and buried secrets rooted in her hometown. What she never expected was to find herself at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath. Here, in this first Ripley novel, we are introduced to suave Tom Ripley, a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for murder and self-invention is chronicled in four subsequent Ripley novels. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information

[kansascityhappenings]

FOX4 Problem Solvers find online advertisements for puppies littered with trouble

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — If you’ve been searching online for a puppy, FOX4 Problem Solvers have two words of advice: Be careful.

The Better Business Bureau estimated that as much as 80 percent of the advertising is fake. KCK mom Bobby Richardson learned that the hard way.

“My daughter was so ecstatic,” said Richardson, referring to the tea cup French bulldog she found online.

According to the ad on Facebook, it was a rescue pup in need of a good home.

Patti Starvaggi, of Pennsylvania, found a Corgi on the same site that she knew would be perfect for her friend.

“He lost his wife 22 months ago to breast cancer and lost his dog,” Starvaggi said.

The seller said the pups were micro-chipped and had papers and shots — all for the low price of $700, less than half of what a pet store would charge.

“If it’s legit we want it,” said Richardson, who was eager to give her 3-year-old daughter a dog.

The seller said he would send the dog to her by plane, but Richardson said she’d rather pick the pup up in person. So where did he live? Communicating primarily through text messages, he sent her an address in Lincoln, Nebraska — just a 3-hour drive away.

The seller insisted Richardson pay him the full price before picking up the dog. But she said no.

“I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” she texted him.

He responded: “I need $100 then to secure it.”

She texted “no” again and told him she was already in the car and on her way to Nebraska.

“Well how about $50?” he texted back.

She kept refusing and kept driving, finally arriving at the Lincoln address — a modest, well-kept home in an older neighborhood. But the homeowner who answered the door had bad news: Richardson had been scammed. In fact, she was the third person that week.

Homeowner Ben Carter said he and his wife no longer even answer their front door because they’ve had so many people show up demanding the pets they’d ordered online. Two people wanted dogs. One person asked for a parrot.

“It’s frustrating because we just bought this house,” Carter said, never realizing that the address was being used in an international scam.

The scam starts on Facebook with multiple sites like “Adams Teacup Yorkies Puppies Owner” or “Johnson’s French Bulldog Village.” Photos of puppies and other animals fill the pages.

To see how the scam works, FOX4 Problem Solvers posed as an interested buyer. The site initially linked us to a legitimate looking, secure page asking for our credit card information, a potentially good sign because if we never received the puppy, we could dispute the charge. But the page wasn’t working.

We were then told via Facebook Messenger that the only form of payment accepted was by MoneyGram or a Walmart card, both red flags for a scam.

As we kept digging into the scam, we found several Facebook pages with the same administrator as the one our page had. His name was Ty Le Formulateur. He appeared to be from the African country of Cameroon.

Although Ty Le Formulateur may be a fake name, international puppy scams are real. They are so prevalent that there is an entire site devoted to exposing them: Petscams.com.

Luckily neither of the women we interviewed paid any money to the scammers. But they did waste a lot of time and gas driving to Nebraska. For Starvaggi, it was a 13-hour trip from her home in Pennsylvania. She was furious when she discovered she’d been scammed.

“I said, ‘I am not leaving this town after I drove all the way here for puppies until I go to the police department,’” Starvaggi said.

She was one of the multiple people who contacted Lincoln police. The homeowners also filed a report.

Officer Angela Sands said this was the first time police there had seen a puppy scam with multiple victims from throughout the country. Sands said there was little a local police department could do about an overseas scam, except report it to the attorney general’s office.

However, a Lincoln police officer did call the scammer, using a phone number one of the victims had been given. It had a Nebraska area code, but was actually a Google Voice app, which allows people to call someone and have a fake number pop up on the screen.

Sands said the man who answered the phone “had a really thick accent and when he was asked for more information by the officer, he hung up on them.”

That might have been enough to discourage the puppy scammers from using a house in Lincoln as their address. The real homeowners have not had anyone else looking for pets show up since.

But rest assured, the puppy scam lives on.

To avoid falling victim to the puppy scam:

Avoid companies claiming to sell pets for suspiciously low prices.

Ask any seller claiming to be a breeder for their breeder number and look it up online.

Refuse to do business with anyone who only wants to talk via email or text message. Insist on a phone call and ask lots of questions.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2018/11/15/fox4-problem-solvers-find-online-advertisements-for-puppies-littered-with-trouble/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/fox4-problem-solvers-find-online-advertisements-for-puppies-littered-with-trouble/

[magicwebsitesnet]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

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of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

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Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

11

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/jacky-rosen-dean-heller-kavanaugh.html |

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[computacionalblog]

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh.

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-jacky-rosen-wants-to-flip-nevada-for-democrats-but-first-kavanaugh/

Nature

Image

Representative Jacky Rosen, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Nevada, is a relative political newcomer. She is taking on the Republican incumbent, Dean Heller, who is widely seen as vulnerable.CreditCreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

LAS VEGAS — Jacky Rosen was introducing herself again.

Milling among a crowd celebrating Mexican Independence Day in a park, Ms. Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee for Nevada, had much on her mind. But to get voters to listen, she needed to make an impression first, with precious little time left before the November election.

“Hi, I’m Jacky,” she said over and over in a hot breeze that smelled like corn dogs — the world’s best, if you trusted the truck making them. An aide motioned for someone to take a picture. “I’m Jacky.”

Some people nodded. Others looked confused.

A first-term congresswoman, Ms. Rosen is in an extraordinary, and tricky, situation: She is running against Senator Dean Heller, the Republicans’ most endangered incumbent, in a year when his party can only afford to lose one seat. And she initially had a powerful weapon: The G.O.P.-led confirmation hearings for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, which enraged many women and Democrats, and Mr. Heller’s gaffe that the sexual assault allegations against the nominee would just be a “hiccup” in his rise to the Supreme Court.

But Ms. Rosen, a 61-year-old former synagogue president, is now among the Democrats nationwide facing new energy from Republican voters who are defending Judge Kavanaugh and his patron, President Trump.

It’s a political moment that requires deft skills on the campaign trail — but Ms. Rosen is still a newcomer to politics, neither cagey nor glossy nor particularly electrifying. In a campaign season filled with rising Democratic stars like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, she is not a phenomenon.

Perhaps more significantly, Nevada is Nevada. Yes, the state voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 2 percentage points, but it has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. Neither quite red nor quite blue, it may be receptive to a fiery takedown of Mr. Heller over Judge Kavanaugh. Or it may not be.

Unlike other states with competitive Senate races where the Kavanaugh issue has thundered into prominence, including North Dakota and Missouri, it is far from clear how the bitter nomination battle will affect the Heller-Rosen race. Political observers say Republican enthusiasm for getting the judge confirmed — which should be decided this weekend — could help Mr. Heller. But the issue also may not measurably change the turnout for either party’s base in a state where political energy is focused elsewhere.

Image

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a left-of-center Democrat whose unobjectionable biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. President Trump has sought to belittle Ms. Rosen, calling her “Wacky Jacky.”CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Even Ms. Rosen isn’t sure. In an interview, she did not criticize Judge Kavanaugh nearly as much as some other Democrats have, and added that she would hit Mr. Heller over the confirmation process but also talk plenty about health care, education and immigration.

If Senator Heller votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, she said, “I think he’s going to have to do a little bit of answering for that.” It hardly served as a sharp rebuke. A moment later, however, she warmed to the subject, saying of her opponent: “He’s just not listening to the voices in Nevada, to Nevada women, to their families who love women, who may have been victims of sexual assault.”

On most issues and political fights, however, Ms. Rosen talks about collaboration and compromise, even as the Democratic base nationally clamors against President Trump. She does not extol the virtues of Medicare for All or abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She does not extol much of anything at all.

Yet it is Jacky Rosen, whose most notable previous political experience was perhaps keeping the peace among spirited congregants at Congregation Ner Tamid, who must choose a strategy in these final weeks on Mr. Heller, Judge Kavanaugh and so much else.

Her allies, at least, are confident that she has the savvy and instincts to help deliver the Senate for the Democrats in November.

“If you can be president of a synagogue,” said Shelley Berkley, a former Nevada congresswoman, “you can be president of the United States very easily.”

Recent polling shows Ms. Rosen in a very tight race against Mr. Heller, a longtime politician who beat Ms. Berkley in 2012 in his Senate bid.

Asked to explain her swift political rise during a separate interview at her campaign office here, Ms. Rosen — polished, practiced, composed — spoke about her willingness to take chances and the support she has received, then drifted into platitudes.

Image

Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with President Trump is a liability.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times

“I’m not a politician,” she said, before reconsidering. “I’m not a career politician.”

But she knows a few. In early 2016, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid — whose influence over the state’s Democratic Party has its own moniker, the “Reid machine” — handpicked Ms. Rosen to run for an open House seat. She won, even as Mr. Trump won her district. It was Mr. Reid, too, who helped persuade Ms. Rosen to run for Senate. Mr. Reid, through an intermediary, declined to comment.

“I tell my daughter who just graduated college, I always tell her, ‘Don’t not do something just ’cause it’s hard. Time is going to go by anyway,’” Ms. Rosen said.

Nevada’s electorate is divided between heavily Republican rural areas in the north and a growing Democratic population revolving around Las Vegas in the South. A growing number of Californians — left-leaning, Democrats hope — along with companies like Tesla and Google, are moving to the state, and the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Its population is increasingly diverse. Because it is so split politically, Nevada’s statewide officials tend toward relative moderation.

Democrats believe Mr. Heller has weaknesses, including a political fiasco over health care that at turns infuriated voters of both parties. And in a state where Mr. Trump’s approval rating is upside down, Democrats believe Mr. Heller’s recent decision to align himself with the president is a liability.

Ms. Rosen’s supporters view her as a viable alternative, a left-of-center Democrat whose biography and sparse voting record leave Republicans with little to attack. She supports a Medicaid buy-in program. She wants comprehensive immigration reform and has backed stricter gun control legislation. If Ms. Rosen is understated — more Mojave Desert beige than Las Vegas neon — that, her backers say, is the point.

Mr. Heller, though, has never lost a race, and his defenders believe he will ultimately prevail.

“I think you have to have a very compelling reason to get rid of an incumbent U.S. Senator,” said Sig Rogich, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, “and there isn’t one.”

Late last month, Mr. Trump appeared alongside Mr. Heller at a rally in Las Vegas and criticized Ms. Rosen. “Wacky Jacky,” he called her, employing his fondness for derogatory nicknames. “She’s wacky.”

Ms. Rosen’s response on Twitter was brief: “Grow up.”

Ms. Rosen was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, a first-generation American who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was an auto salesman. Her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Rosen was a member of the drama club and remembers playing Mrs. Webb in a high-school production of “Our Town.”

When Ms. Rosen was in college at the University of Minnesota, her parents moved to Las Vegas, where she spent a summer working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace. “I was a college student from the Midwest,” she said, “so I was very much like a fish out of water.”

She graduated in December 1979 with a degree in psychology, then moved to southern Nevada and worked for many years as a computer programmer.

Several years ago, she was elected president of Congregation Ner Tamid, among the biggest synagogues in the state. There, she helped reduce the synagogue’s expenses, in part by installing solar panels.

“She was very fiscally sound,” said Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, the synagogue’s spiritual leader and one of Ms. Rosen’s friends.

Ms. Rosen’s leadership drew the attention of one of the synagogue’s members, Elissa Cadish, a district judge. After many people rebuffed Mr. Reid’s overtures to run for the open congressional seat, Judge Cadish recommended he call Ms. Rosen.

“They asked a lot of the usual kinds of people to run,” Ms. Rosen said, before speculating that other possible candidates saw the race as too risky. “No one told me that. But I’m assuming this is why they didn’t want to do it.”

And though some friends say she was never particularly political — “Who knew she was going to go into politics?” Mr. Akselrad said — they also say the ease with which she has taken to public office is not surprising.

Part of Ms. Rosen’s challenge, including over Judge Kavanaugh, is that she prefers peacemaking. She is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a House group that tries to reach bipartisan agreements on policy issues like infrastructure. She boasts about being ranked the fifth-most bipartisan freshman member in the House. Though she called some of the Trump administration’s policies “reckless,” she also said she agreed with the president on some things, including his decision to move the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. (Though she said that she did not like how he did so “unilaterally.”)

Image

Hispanic voters are part of a political coalition that Democrats are hoping to build in Nevada.CreditJoe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Ms. Rosen’s detractors call her inexperienced and ineffective. And in an ad, Mr. Heller’s campaign charged that she inflated her résumé, saying that she did not earn a degree in computers, as she has said, and that she exaggerated her claim that she built a business.

In response, Ms. Rosen said she had received an associate degree in applied sciences in computing and information technology, a claim that The Las Vegas Review-Journal verified. She also released an ad stating she “ran an independent consulting business.”

Ms. Rosen’s biggest hurdle may be that Mr. Heller, who has been in politics for some 30 years, is simply better known. He lives on a ranch. He rides horses at parades. While Mr. Heller’s “hiccup” line about Judge Kavanaugh drew national media attention, it is unclear if it has damaged — or helped — him significantly in Nevada. (Ms. Rosen began running a digital ad this week about his support for Judge Kavanaugh; she said she had not decided whether to cut a TV commercial on the subject.)

Quincy Branch, 41, who runs an independent insurance agency and previously voted for Mr. Heller, noted the senator’s advantage before a round-table Ms. Rosen held recently with African-American entrepreneurs.

“He’s been here,” Mr. Branch said, about Mr. Heller. “If Jacky can wedge that, then I think she has a stronger chance.” He said he was undecided in this race.

Ms. Rosen, as most candidates do, projected confidence heading into the last weeks before the election, brushing off the suggestion that Mr. Heller’s name recognition would help. “They may know him,” she said, “but they’re not happy with him.”

On a recent weekend afternoon, before she made her way to the Mexican Independence Day celebration, Ms. Rosen was in East Las Vegas, a lower-income part of the city. A small, largely Hispanic crowd — part of an important coalition of voters for Democrats — had gathered for an event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month, and Ms. Rosen paused frequently to allow a translator to repeat her words in Spanish.

“I’m the granddaughter of immigrants,” she said. A child hummed somewhere in the audience.

At the end of her speech, she urged everyone to get out the vote. She told them to text a number to support her campaign, and tried repeating the number in Spanish.

“How’s that?” she asked, triumphantly.

Then she set off into the desert heat, ready to introduce herself anew.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

11

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Battle to Flip Nevada Blue Includes a Wild Card (Kavanaugh)

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/politics/jacky-rosen-dean-heller-kavanaugh.html |

Nature Jacky Rosen Wants to Flip Nevada for Democrats. But First, Kavanaugh., in 2018-10-07 01:39:59

[thuocbacgiatruyenaphaco-blog]

Farsight Security COO Alexa Raad: 'Be Your Own Champion'

New Post has been published on http://thuocbacgiatruyen.com/farsight-security-coo-alexa-raad-be-your-own-champion/

Farsight Security COO Alexa Raad: 'Be Your Own Champion'

Alexa Raad is chief operating officer of Farsight Security, based in San Mateo, California. Farsight Security is a provider of real-time actionable Internet threat intelligence solutions.

In this exclusive interview, Raad discusses methods of curbing cybercrime by tracking bad actors through the trails they leave in the domain name system. She also offers some encouraging advice to women and girls interested in breaking into the cybersecurity field.

Farsight Security COO Alexa Raad

Alexa Raad

Chief Operating Officer

Farsight Security

TechNewsWorld: What is Farsight Security’s mission?

Alexa Raad: We believe that everyone is entitled to a safer Internet, and so everything we do starts out with that mission in mind. What we do is provide Internet defenders with very valuable data that they can use to get some context around nefarious acts.

As an example, if you think about Internet threats like phishing and botnets and malware — all of those start with a DNS — a domain name system. And so every kind of nefarious act leaves footprints and fingerprints in the DNS. That’s something that cannot be faked. We provide information that is contextual.

Aspose Ad

To give an example, a lot of the new domain names that are registered are typically registered with bad intent, meaning criminals are going to use them to commit some sort of act, like phishing attacks, etc. When a domain name is registered, it’s fine, but when traffic starts going to those sites, it becomes much more dangerous.

When people start actually going to a phishing site, it raises the threat level. We have a global sensor network that picks up these resolutions. We collect this data, but without any personally-identifiable information, which is important.

That information allows people to see what’s actually got some traction, and we also add additional information for guilt by association. If a phishing site is actually hosted where there are lots of other bad actors or bad sites, that provides you with some context. You start to follow that and get a better picture of that attack than you would otherwise.

We provide real-time and historical information, and both are contextual. The real-time data is important, because you have to fight these battles in near real time. The historical information is important because you want to know if this was the first time we ever saw this URL or domain name. A lot of these patterns repeat themselves. It is unlikely that a site was bad six months ago and all of a sudden it’s reformed. Having that contextual information is important.

TNW: Why do you have a passion for cybersecurity? Why do you think it’s an important and vital field?

Raad: I believe in the mission of cybersecurity. I want to leave our kids with a safer Internet. The Internet is such a utility — we all rely on it, and we have to have some modicum of expectation that the Internet is safe.

The DNS is a fabric that’s equalizing. Regardless of where you are on the Internet, you have a voice. We’re learning that if Internet is not taken care of, there will be unintended consequences.

TNW: What are some of the key cybersecurity issues today? What are some prevalent or common problems that we face?

Raad: There’s an increasing number of attacks with the Internet of things. The number of Internet-enabled devices is increasing, and all of these connected devices provide vectors for cybersecurity attacks. The race is on for cheaper devices, but the race isn’t necessarily on to create more secure devices.

TNW: What advice would you give to girls and women wanting to get into the cybersecurity field?

Raad: It’s the ideal field for women. To be really good in cybersecurity, you have to have an inquisitive mind, be a problem-solver, and see things holistically.

For a problem that’s complex, you need to think holistically, you can’t compartmentalize. You have to think, how would a criminal look at your DNS architecture? Women tend to think holistically, and if you do, you will excel in this field.

The other piece of advice I would give is that you have got to be your own champion. Don’t wait for anyone to propose something to you or to give you the promotion that you deserve. You have to speak up. You have to be your own advocate, and you have to lay out the business case.

If you want to be promoted, for instance, you have to say, this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ve accomplished, this is what I can do more of, and this is why it’s in your own best interest to promote me. There is an imbalance in the number of women in power, and it’s also at the executive level. Very few women are CEOs or in the c-suite or on the board, and there is a lot that women can offer and do.

Whether it’s because companies recognize the need to hire more women or they have a policy to do so, the opportunities for women are there. The security industry is growing. There aren’t enough people to fill the jobs available, and a lot of them are high-paying, with good benefits. You just need to be your own champion.

TNW: What new cyberthreats are emerging, and how can businesses prepare themselves to face them?

Raad: You see a lot of ransomware. Just a few weeks ago I was at my dentist, and he told me that he had just been the victim of a ransomware attack, and he ended up paying it. You wouldn’t have thought he would be the victim of an attack like that, but someone in his organization had clicked on a link, and all of his patient records were frozen until he paid the ransom.

You will see more of this because it pays well, and it targets people who aren’t well-versed in security hygiene. We’ll see more and more of the security issues and attacks that come because of insecure devices like wearables and Internet-connected devices.

There isn’t an incentive for manufacturers to create more security. The economic incentive is more toward creating devices that are cheaper and more affordable than more security, but it really has to be both. It requires both better engineering and better policy

[patriotsnet]

Who Were The Republicans That Voted For Obamacare

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Who Were The Republicans That Voted For Obamacare

Actual Events That Occurred As A Result Of The Affordable Care Act 2011 To 2014

January, 2011: In 2011, insurance companies had to ensure the value for premium payments. If insurance companies did not spend at least 80% to 85% of premiums on care the difference is sent to customers in a refund.

January 2011: A Florida judge rules that elements of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

November 14, 2011: The US Supreme Court agrees to hear arguments in the Obamacare case brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. It argues that elements of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

January, 2014: Health Affairs published its most recent analysis of Medical Loss Ratio performance by major insurers.

March, 2014: The New York Times reports that the U.S. Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data changed its annual survey so thoroughly that it became difficult to measure the effects of President Obamas health care law. 

How Different Groups Of Republicans Voted

Many hard-line conservatives, including Freedom Caucus members and recipients of campaign contributions from the caucus’s political action committee, expressed opposition to the bill in its original form, but voted yes on Thursday after several changes to the legislation. Much of the Republican opposition to the bill came from members whose districts voted for Hillary Clinton.

Affordable Health Care For America Act

Jump to navigationJump to searchPatient Protection and Affordable Care ActAmerican Health Care Act

This article is part of a serieson

The Affordable Health Care for America Act was a that was crafted by the United States House of Representatives of the 111th United States Congress on October 29, 2009. The bill was sponsored by Representative Charles Rangel. At the encouragement of the Obama administration, the 111th Congress devoted much of its time to enacting reform of the United States’ health care system. Known as the “House bill, HR 3962 was the House of Representatives’ chief legislative proposal during the health reform debate.

On December 24, 2009, the Senate passed an alternative health care bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act . In 2010, the House abandoned its reform bill in favor of amending the Senate bill ” rel=”nofollow”>reconciliation process) in the form of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Senators Who Had Voted Against Obamacare Repeal Are Now Wavering

Matt Fuller

WASHINGTON Theres nothing like a deadline to get things moving on Capitol Hill, and with a Sept. 30 expiration date for the bill that want to use for an Affordable Care Act repeal, Senate Republicans who once seemed resolutely opposed to even the most modest Obamacare repeal suddenly sounded less resolute Monday.

The proposal authored by Sens. Lindsey Graham , Bill Cassidy and other Republican colleagues would still likely result in millions losing coverage. The bill would still cut Medicaid, albeit over a longer timeline, and states could still choose to undermine protections for people with pre-existing conditions. But the measure, attached to a reconciliation bill that allows a simple majority vote, would give states more flexibility in deciding those cuts and coverage decisions.

That flexibility has inspired Sen. Rand Paul to come out strongly against the legislation, castigating the bill as a rebranding of Obamacare. Conservatives should say no, Paul Monday.

The proposal, however, is seemingly less repellent to Sen. Lisa Murkowski , one of the three Senate Republicans who voted against the skinny repeal in July, along with Susan Collins and John McCain . Murkowski told HuffPost on Monday that shes undecided on Graham-Cassidy, as the measure is known, and that she and her staff were still looking to see how Alaska would make out under the bill.

Whether we repeal and replace Obamacare comes down to a few key senators, Meadows said.

Employer Mandate And Part

Health insurance mandate

The employer mandate applies to employers of more than fifty where health insurance is provided only to the full-time workers. Critics claimed it created a perverse incentive to hire part-timers instead. However, between March 2010 and 2014, the number of part-time jobs declined by 230,000 while the number of full-time jobs increased by two million. In the public sector full-time jobs turned into part-time jobs much more than in the private sector. A 2016 study found only limited evidence that ACA had increased part-time employment.

Several businesses and the state of Virginia added a 29-hour-a-week cap for their part-time employees, to reflect the 30-hour-or-more definition for full-time worker. As of 2013, few companies had shifted their workforce towards more part-time hours . Trends in working hours and the recovery from the Great Recession correlate with the shift from part-time to full-time work. Other confounding impacts include that health insurance helps attract and retain employees, increases productivity and reduces absenteeism; and lowers corresponding training and administration costs from a smaller, more stable workforce. Relatively few firms employ over 50 employees and more than 90% of them already offered insurance.

Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Laws Ripped From ‘the Handmaid’s Tale’

Then there are the political headaches that would be triggered by the overturning of Roe: the likely countermobilization of liberals and alienation of many moderates suddenly witnessing the painful realities of abortion bans, and stronger pushes in Republican ranks for a total national abortion ban and other extreme measures.

The Republicans incendiary antiabortion rhetoric could come back to haunt. If abortion constitutes the murdering of babies, as antiabortion language insists, and theres no longer a Roe v. Wade getting in the way, arent the Republicans obliged to ban it in every instance and every place, whether through the courts or the political process?

Will Biden get in the ring?: Patients shouldn’t have to fight this hard for an abortion 

Expect emboldened right-wing politicians to push more legislation that sounds like its been ripped from the scripts of The Handmaids Tale.” Abortion bans that make no exceptions for victims of rape or incest  a hallmark of the Mississippi law heading to the high court this fall. Bills like one that advanced recently in Pennsylvania that focuses not just on abortions but miscarriages, too  categorizing miscarriages as deaths and requiring health care facilities to file death certificates and get burial permits. As if the would-be mother werent already suffering enough, now this extra burden, served up with a sinister insinuation about her miscarriage. 

Rep Tom Reed Of New York

Reed, a leader of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, broke with his party on a handful of votes relating to the government shutdown at the start of the year. He told Roll Call after Wednesdays vote that he was concerned about his partys position on health care heading into 2020.

Hopefully, maybe, this puts a marker down with our leadership and with the Republican Party in the House and Senate, as well as across the country, that we owe it to the American people to show in black and white how were going to fix health care, he said.

The DCCC is not targeting Reed, who won re-election by 8 points in 2018.

Trump carried Reeds district, which stretches along the border with Pennsylvania, by 15 points. Reeds 2018 opponent, cybersecurity expert Tracy Mitrano, is running again. Inside Elections rates the race Solid Republican.

Trump: We’ll Soon See If Republicans Will ‘step Up To The Plate’ On Health Care

I’m not going to vote for something that’s a scaled down version, that’s a political punt,” Graham said earlier Tuesday. The South Carolina Republican will vote for the motion to proceed but added that a final product to fix the health care system should go through “regular order.”

Collins said the proposal wasnt described at the weekly Senate GOP policy lunch.

And so apparently that is an amendment that the leader would offer at the end, she said. I have no idea whats going into that.

And Republicans are considering making further changes to the repeal-and-replace plan. Administration officials and senators are discussing adding as much as $100 billion more to earlier drafts to help low-income people with premiums, Republicans said.

Before Tuesday’s vote, McConnell urged senators to take the first step to provide relief on this failed left-wing experiment.

Id like to reiterate what the president said yesterday. Any senator who votes against starting debate, he said, is telling America that you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare Thats a position that even Democrats have found hard to defend, McConnell said.

The fate of the vote was uncertain as recently as Tuesday morning. Paul, Heller and moderate Sen. Shelley Moore Capito waited until the final hours before the vote to announce they would support opening debate on the bill.

Heller said his support for whatever emerges later is not assured.

Rep Pete Stauber Of Minnesota

The freshman flipped a longtime Democratic seat in northeast Minnesota that Trump had carried by 16 points in 2016. Its a largely white, working-class district, where Trumps populist appeal resonated. The former Duluth police officer ran a campaign ad last year about his son Issac, who has Down syndrome, and he talked about the importance of insurance companies covering pre-existing conditions. Democrats are not targeting this seat in 2020. Inside Elections rates the race Likely Republican.

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act In 2014

October 1, 2013: Health insurance exchanges scheduled to open for 2014 enrollment begin writing policies that go into effect January 1, 2014.

January 2014: People buying insurance on their own get subsidies to help them pay their monthly insurance premiums. Premiums are allocated on a sliding scale, as determined by income. Any individual earning over 400% of the poverty level does not qualify for subsidies.

January 2014: When health insurance exchanges are operational, small business tax credits are up to 50% of premiums.

January 2014: Insurance companies are required to provide health insurance to any adult aged 19 to 64 who applies for coverage.

January 2014: To prevent people from waiting until they get sick to buy health insurance, the ACA requires all Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine. The fine starts at $95 for an individual in 2014 and goes up each year until 2016, when the fine is $695 or 2.5% of a persons annual income, whichever is greater.

January 2014: Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plans , established in 2010 are scheduled to expire on January 1, 2014 once all major ACA reforms go into effect.

What Did Trump Say About Obamacare

President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”

A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after axed parts of it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.

“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.

“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”

Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.

According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.

Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.

“The 2020 election will be pretty simple: if you want more sick people without healthcare coughing on you, vote Trump.”

Scotus Votes To Uphold Obamacare Based On A Technicality No Decision On Constitutional Issues

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Republican bid that had been backed by former President Donald Trumps administration to invalidate the Obamacare healthcare law, ruling that Texas and other challengers had no legal standing to file their lawsuit.

The 7-2 ruling authored by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer did not decide broader legal questions raised in the case about whether a key provision in the law, which is formally called the Affordable Care Act, was unconstitutional and, if so, whether the rest of the statute should be struck down.

The provision, called the individual mandate, originally required Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a financial penalty.

It marked the third time the court has preserved Obamacare since its 2010 enactment.

Breyer wrote that none of the challengers, including Texas and 17 other states and individual plaintiffs, could trace a legal injury to the individual mandate.

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Joe Bidens administration in February urged the Supreme Court to uphold Obamacare, reversing the position taken by the government under Trump, who left office in January.

After Texas and other states sued, a coalition of 20 states including Democratic-governed California and New York and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives intervened in the case to try to preserve Obamacare after Trump refused to defend the law.

A Final Vote Isn’t The Whole Story It’s Like Researching Your Ancestry And Going No Further Back Than Your Mother And Father

The day after she was one of three Republican senators to vote against her party’s proposal to repeal chunks of the Affordable Care Act, Susan Collins of Maine posted a press release that said: “Democrats made a big mistake when they passed the ACA without a single Republican vote. I don’t want to see Republicans make the same mistake.”

It was a nice nod in the direction of bipartisanship. But it also perpetuates a deceptive narrative, repeated often by Republicans, that they were completely excluded from the process that resulted in Obamacare. While it is true that no Republican voted for the final bill, it is blatantly untrue that it contains no GOP DNA. In fact, to make such an assertion is like researching your ancestry and going no further back than your mother and father. 

Not only were Republican senators deeply involved in the process up until its conclusion, but it’s a cinch that the ACA might have become law months earlier if the Democrats, hoping for a bipartisan bill, hadn’t spent enormous time and effort wooing GOP senators only to find themselves gulled by false promises of cooperation. And unlike Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s semi-secret proceedings that involved only a handful of trusted colleagues, Obamacare, until the very end of the process, was open to public scrutiny.

More:Spare America a do-over on health care. Seize the bipartisan moment.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Requirements For Health Plans And Insurers

See also: Health insurance policy cancellations since Obamacare

Coverage

The Affordable Care Act prohibited individual market insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. This policy is known as guaranteed issue. Guaranteed issue regulations had already existed for insurers selling employer-sponsored health plans, and the ACA extended this rule to the individual market as well.

The law also required insurers to allow young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until age 26. Insurers were also required to allow people in the individual market to renew their health plans each year unless they did not pay their premiums.

Benefits

The ACA required individual and small group health plans that were offered both on and off the exchanges to cover services that fall into 10 broad benefits categories, called essential health benefits:

Ambulatory patient services

Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices

Prescription drugs

Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment

Laboratory services

Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management

Pediatric services, including oral and vision care

Premiums

The ACA placed restrictions on the way individual and small group insurers set a plan’s The amount a consumer is required to pay for a health insurance plan. Premiums are usually paid monthly, quarterly or annually.:

Nancy Pelosi

Medical loss ratio

Stabilization programs

The House Has Voted 54 Times In Four Years On Obamacare Heres The Full List

Sunday marks the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, however you prefer to describe it.

While Democrats are struggling with whether to embrace the law or push for changes, Republicans are reminding voters that since they took control of the House in 2011, they’ve voted 54 times to undo, revamp or tweak the law. Here’s a full list of those votes, as provided by GOP aides. Dates with an asterisk denote a bill that also passed the Senate and was signed by President Obama:

Votes during the 112th Congress, from 2011-2012:

1.Jan. 19, 2011: The “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act” would have repealed all of the Affordable Care Act. It passed 245 to 189 with three Democrats voting for it, but was never considered by the Senate.

2.Feb. 19, 2011: The House’s version of the fiscal 2011 continuing appropriations bill included several amendments that would have “severely limited” implementation of the law. It passed 221 to 202 with no Democratic votes and was never considered in the Senate.

The next few votes were on amendments added to the appropriations bill:

3.The Rehberg Amendment #575: Prohibited funding for any employee, officer, contractor or grantee of any agencies funded under appropriations for the departments of Health and Human Services and Labor to implement provisions of the law.

4.The King Amendment #267: Ensured that no money included in the appropriations bill would be used to implement the law.

Democrats Sought To Put Gop Colleagues On Record With Symbolic Vote

Bridget BowmanSimone Pathé

Democratic congressional campaigns have already made health care an early focus of their 2020 messaging, and House Democrats bolstered that effort Wednesday with a symbolic vote that sought to once again put Republicans on record on the issue.

Eight Republicans sided with Democrats on the nonbinding resolution, which the House adopted, 240-186. The measure condemned the Trump administrations support for invalidating the 2010 health care law in its entirety. The Department of Justice, in a new filing last week, backed a Texas judges decision to strike down the law. 

Three Republicans  New Yorks Tom Reed and John Katko and Pennsylvanias Brian Fitzpatrick had voted in January to authorize the House general counsel to intervene in the lawsuit to defend the health care law. All three also voted for the resolution Wednesday.

One Democrat 15-term Minnesota Rep. Collin C. Peterson bucked his party and voted against the resolution. Hes one of the last Democrats remaining in the House who opposed the 2010 health care law and is likely the last Democrat who can hold his heavily agricultural 7th District seat.

Democrats were otherwise united in supporting the resolution, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched positive Facebook ads touting their vulnerable members votes to protect families with pre-existing conditions.

Also watch: What if we switch to a single-payer health care system?

How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare

The Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, received no Republican votes in either the Senate or the House of Representatives when it was passed in 2009. In the Senate, the bill was passed with a total of 60 votes, or 58 Democratic Party votes and 2 Independent Party votes. The House passed the legislation with 219 Democratic votes.

The Affordable Care Act received 39 votes against it in the Senate, all from Republicans. One senator abstained from voting. In the House, the ACA received 212 votes against it, with 34 coming from the Democratic Party and 178 from the Republican Party. There were enough votes for the ACA in the Senate to prevent an attempt to filibuster the bill, while the House vote required a simple majority.

The ACA originated in the Senate, though both the House and Senate were working on versions of a health care bill at the same time. Democrats in the House of Representatives were initially unhappy with the ACA, as they had expected some ability to negotiate additional changes before its passage. Since Republicans in the Senate were threatening to filibuster any bill they did not fully support, and Democrats no longer had enough seats to override the filibuster, no changes could be made. Since any changes to the legislation by the House would require it to be re-evaluated in the Senate, the original version was passed in 2009 on condition that it would be amended by a subsequent bill.

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act After 180 Days

September 23, 2010 :

Seniors are entitled to a $250 rebate to close the Medicare Part D coverage gap.

A government website is created to allow people to search for information about health insurance companies, available plans, and other essential facts.

Insurers are not permitted to exclude pre-existing conditions from coverage for children.

October 19, 2010: eHealth publishes its first in a series of resources to help uninsured children navigate differences in individual states.

History Lesson: How The Democrats Pushed Obamacare Through The Senate

Twenty-five days of consecutive session on a bill that was partisan in the sense that Republicans were angry with it, but we still had the courage of our convictions to have a debate on the floor. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer , remarks on the Senate floor, June 19, 2017

To highlight the secrecy of the GOP health-care deliberations, many Senate Democrats have pointed out that the debate over the Affordable Care Act was the second-longest consecutive session in Senate history. Schumer even sought a parliamentary inquiry on the claim, and it was confirmed by the presiding officer, Sen. Joni Ernst

The Secretary of the Senates office notes that H.R. 3590 was considered on each of 25 consecutive days of session, and the Senate Library estimates approximately 169 hours in total consideration, she said.

The longest session, Feb. 12-March 9, 1917, concerned whether to arm merchant ships during World War I, shortly before the United States entered the conflict. That lasted 26 days.

But this statistic obscures a reality: The key work on creating the Senate version of the ACA was done in secret. Lets take a trip down memory lane.

Republicans Plan Healthcare Vote; Obama And Tv Host Denounce Bill

6 Min Read

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans announced plans to vote next week on their latest bid to scuttle Obamacare even as a popular comedian who has become part of the U.S. healthcare debate denounced the bill and former President Barack Obama on Wednesday warned of real human suffering.

President Donald Trump, who has expressed frustration at the Senates failure thus far to pass legislation dismantling Obamas signature legislative achievement, said 47 or 48 Republicans back the bill, which needs 50 votes for passage in the 100-seat Senate, which his Republican Party controls 52-48.

We think this has a very good chance, Trump, who made replacing Obamacare a top 2016 campaign promise, told reporters during an appearance with Egypts president in New York.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul opposes the bill. At least five other Republicans are undecided on it: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona and Jerry Moran of Kansas.

Republican Senator John Thune on Fox News said: Were a handful of votes short of having the 50 that we need.

As they worked to gather enough votes to win, after prior legislation failed in July, congressional Republicans and the White House were on the defensive after Jimmy Kimmel used his late-night TV show to blast the proposal and call Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, one of its two sponsors, a liar.

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